


it's not our house that we remember

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Sometimes You And Your Brother Go On An ABC Family Harry Potter Weekend Spiral And Then Get Big Mad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:46:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23292676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Eleven years later, Teddy comes home.
Kudos: 19
Collections: Anonymous





	it's not our house that we remember

**Author's Note:**

> truly this is not anything i would normally write, or a fandom that i intend to ever write for again. but sometimes you're gripped by a visceral rage that harry potter is intimately imbued with all of jk rowling's personal biases and heteronormativity and homophobia and transphobia etc etc and then you get incredibly worked up about the movie epilogue which could have been SO great with that john williams/alexandre desplat score if the actual source epilogue hadn't been uniquely terrible. and then this happens. anyway. i haven't even read this over once for typos i wrote it in a fugue state at 11pm.

**Eleven Years Later**

The Hogwarts Express existed out of time. Its gleaming scarlet exterior never seemed to lose its brilliance, the mechanisms never lost that quaintly out-of-date jostle, the upholstery never wore down more than anyone ever remembered it being. There were grooves in the hallways that connected the cars from a trolley that creaked along as reliably as it always had. There was a charming nostalgia to it, even to the scrawniest of eleven-year-olds that clambered inside, awed at the world of magic like they never would be again.

When it departed Hogwarts that late June morning, half a dozen professors held their breath until the last wisps of steam disappeared through the mountains. Minerva McGonogall did not leave her post until sunset, when a tawny owl fluttered its way onto a perch on the bridge railing and cocked its head.

The fear lingered at Hogwarts, long after the bookshelves and archways had been rebuilt. It took longer to sweep out of the corners than the rubble of towers, and much more effort to scrub out of the flagstones than blood.

And yet the children chattering on the train that afternoon did not know it. The oldest of them were three, when the wizarding world almost fractured like so many bodies against the ground. The youngest of them knew little of the gaps in family trees, of words unspoken and graves visited each May. They laughed and gossiped and cried tears of remorse at the thought of leaving their friends, and scrawled addresses with ballpoint pens and self-inking quills, and traded chocolate frog and baseball cards with furious intensity.

Halfway through the train, in a quiet car, a boy slept with his forehead pressed against the window. Despite the heat, his breath fogged up the glass, enough to give the impression of frost. His bangs, dirty blond and vaguely curled, covered his eyes, as firmly shut as they were.

Teddy Lupin was not lacking in friends or housemates, but he’d spent late detentions with Slughorn for the entire week after exams, following a particularly nasty trick with a sticking charm and no less than twelve flesh-eating slugs, and they all agreed that it might simply be better to let him rest for a while before the bustle at King’s Cross.

And so Teddy slept, with his eyebrows furrowed underneath his bangs and his gaunt face, skinny in that way children always seem to get before they grow, set in consternation at his dreams. The elbows of his tweed jacket were patched, from several unfortunate incidents in the Dark Forest, and his corduroy pants were tattered, and he held a beat-up suitcase between his knees like he was afraid, even in his sleep, that someone might snatch it from him.

 _R. J. Lupin_ , said the brass plaque above the latch.

“Don’t forget to call,” Jessica Bones repeated, just outside the latched door, over and over until her girlfriend rolled her eyes and stuffed her mouth with the remaining half of a Liquorice Wand.

“—and so my Uncle said that if I found one of the secret passages in Hogsmeade, he’d buy me a Nimbus Gen 4—” hissed Bee Vane, captain of the Ravenclaw quidditch team, to a group of rapturous third-years.

“I did miss my electric toothbrush,” said Tommy Jordan a few cars down, a muggle-born first year, as he shoved his green-striped tie back into his bookbag. “And my cat, you know.”

The chatter wound up and down the train until the very last moment, when the brakes began to shriek and the students pitched forward with the friendly momentum of the stop. King’s Cross rose up all around them, almost like a castle itself, and Teddy stirred only when an older Hufflepuff banged on the door of his car, tossing back a friendly smile as she was dragged away by the rush of the offloading crowd.

He took a moment for himself, to stretch out limbs that seemed longer than they were when he had boarded this train on the first of September. The bones of his wrists just barely stuck out from his favorite jacket’s sleeves.

The crush of the crowed slowed, as nearly all of the students finished tumbling out of the train. Teddy tucked the silvery corner of a cloak back into the bulging hinge of his suitcase, and grasped the handle with all of his strength, and joined the last of the stragglers until he emerged into the humid summer air, platform nine and three-quarters crowded to bursting with family and laughter and the shrieking agony of students separated for a long, miserable two months.

For a moment, as he stepped from the train to the platform, Teddy felt as though he was drowning. His eyes, firmly brown, scanned the crowd and found that he couldn’t see above a single one of them; that the mess of bodies writhed and ebbed like an unfamiliar ocean, with creatures in it much more sinister than the giant squid who he’d managed to bribe into taking a liking to him.

For a moment, he drowned. And then the crowd parted, barely, miraculously, and Teddy caught a glimpse of a familiar head, straining to see over the heads of people much taller than the both of them.

Teddy ran as much as he could, pushing through bodies until he saw them. The half-dozen people waiting for him, with beaming faces and outstretched arms.

Hermione, with sixteen different brightly-flashing buttons on the lapels of her coat, each for another cause. Ron, caught halfway in his constant indecision between a smooth face and a vibrant red beard. Ginny and Luna, their elbows hooked together and their hair in matching jagged cuts. Andromeda Tonks, his grandmother, glowing with relief he knew just enough about the world to understand.

Without losing his grip on his suitcase, some of his only tangible proof of his father’s existence beyond several unflattering newspaper clippings, Teddy sprinted forward. There was just enough space on the platform for him to pick up momentum, to really get going, and Teddy hurled himself forward with all the longing homesickness of an eleven-year-old who misses his family. He tripped, at the last moment, and sprawled into familiar arms.

“Careful there,” his godfather laughed, and pulled him closer into the hug.

And Teddy, standing up on his tiptoes to hook his chin over Harry Potter’s shoulder, eyes squeezed tightly shut, hugged back with all the strength in his skinny arms. His hair melted into deep black, sticking up like it had never seen a brush a day in its life.

“Hi, Dad,” he sighed, and Harry’s grin, if at all possible, grew wider.

Teddy pulled back, and felt his arm swing with the weight of his suitcase. He looked up at his godfather with eyes as green and vivid as the sprawl of the forest from the Astronomy tower, stretching out for miles until it faded into mist.

“Hey, Teddy,” Harry said, and pressed a kiss to the center of his forehead, and felt the pride in him bubble so hot he had to swallow down a heavy batch of tears.

“Welcome home.”


End file.
